Biden criticizes Romney, Ryan at UT rally

An impassioned Vice President Joe Biden criticized former Gov. Mitt Romney’s and Rep. Paul Ryan’s policies and “inconsistent” stances at the University of Toledo on Oct. 23.

Ryan and Romney have “a foreign policy out of the ’80s, a social policy out of the ’50s and an economic policy out of the ’20s,” Biden said.

Biden spoke to a more intimate crowd of 1,500 compared to the group of more than 5,500 that President Barack Obama addressed Sept. 26 in Bowling Green. Romney spoke to 3,500 people at the SeaGate Centre that same day and Ryan spoke at Toledo Express Airport on Oct. 8.

Since starting his vice presidency, Biden has traveled to Ohio 23 times. In 2012, he has been to Ohio nine times. Biden last spoke in Toledo at the United Auto Workers Hall in March.

“Last night, you saw Gov. Romney rush to agree with President Obama,” Biden said, adding, to laughs, “I was stunned and pleased that Gov. Romney had disavowed so many things he had said in the past.”

“Some days [Romney and Ryan] go out there and rattle the sabers; some days they are doves carrying olive branches,” Biden said. “The only thing consistent about the way they talk about policy is that they are inconsistent. That’s the only thing.”

The vice president also focused on women’s rights in his speech.

“One of the things that bound us (Obama/Biden) together from the very beginning as a team is he is absolutely as committed as I am and I’m as committed as he is about one fundamental thing: My daughter, my four granddaughters, his daughters deserve every single opportunity my sons have,” he said. Biden’s daughter Ashley was also in attendance at the event and spoke just before her father.

The vice president added that Romney would give the power to insurance companies when it comes to women’s health issues.

“This is a fellow whose chief adviser said he was not supportive of the Lilly Ledbetter Act,” Biden said.

Biden later bashed Romney’s role in shipping jobs overseas as leader of Bain Capital and later as governor of Massachusetts.

“It was Bain’s job to go to the cheapest market they could find, the lowest wages they could find, I get that, but folks, I got news for Gov. Romney: That’s not the president’s job,” Biden said.

Romney and Ryan’s economic policies would hurt the middle class because their proposed tax cuts would favor 120,000 families and hurt education and Medicare, Biden added.

The Republican candidates have also not been able to name any tax exemption they would eliminate for the wealthy, Biden said.

“The only loophole they say they will not change is the loophole that allows Gov. Romney to pay 14 percent on $20 million a year,” he said.

Tax experts say the only way to accomplish those cuts would be to raise taxes for middle-class families with children by $2,000 a year, Biden said.

“To pay for these massive tax cuts and another $2 trillion in defense spending the defense department’s not even asking for, that’s what they have to do. They have to raise your taxes, and they have to eviscerate the budget on things that make the middle class and the middle class’s workforce,” Biden said.

Obama’s economic policies would create a million manufacturing jobs and double the amount of exports by giving breaks to companies that keep jobs in the United States, Biden said.

Biden also told the crowd, which included many students, that the president would expand student aid and loans and also work to hire 100,000 new math and science teachers.

The vice president addressed defense issues and said he and Obama would end the war in Afghanistan and make taking care of U.S. troops and veterans a priority.

“There’s only one sacred obligation we have. We have an obligation to our children, the elderly and to the poor, but there is no obligation that is the same as the obligation we have to make sure we equip our troops when we send them to war and care for them when they come home,” Biden said.

Rep. Marcy Kaptur also addressed the crowd. She highlighted the importance of early voting, a central theme of the Obama campaign this year.

She criticized Secretary of State Jon Husted’s opposition to early voting on the three days before the Nov. 6 election. Husted brought the early voting case before the U.S. Supreme Court, but on Oct. 16, the court declined to take on the federal ruling allowing early voting on those days.

“What kind of Secretary of State is that? One that needs to be removed,” Kaptur said.

Guyton Mathews IV, a political science and communication student and fellow at UT, also spoke before Biden.

Mathews said when he found out he would be speaking before the vice president a couple of days ago, he was “definitely excited and a little nervous.”

Although he has spoken in public before, “There’s really no way to prepare for that,” he said with a chuckle.

Women’s rights and education are important to Mathews because he has two younger sisters and a younger brother.

“I have two younger sisters and I care about women’s rights and health care and I know when they start their careers, they’ll have equal pay for equal work because of team Obama/Biden,” he said.

Equal rights are also important to fellow eventgoer Beth Bingle, a “retired stay-at-home mom” from Old Orchard.

“I’ve never heard [Biden] speak before. You really get a feel for [candidates] when you see them in person,” she said, adding that she values a “people over money” philosophy.

“Equality for women is one [issue] that I find extremely important,” Bingle said.

If Romney were elected, “I don’t see any progress in that regard at all. I see us backsliding and it makes me very nervous,” she said.

Christopher Maloney, Romney for President Ohio spokesman, said in a statement, “Instead of laying out a second-term agenda, or ideas for how we can stop the recent loss of Ohio manufacturing jobs, Joe Biden instead chose to resort to the same tired distortions and negative attacks which have come to define the Obama campaign’s closing argument for their re-election. The Obama campaign finds themselves losing ground in Ohio because voters are looking for leadership, not four more years of higher taxes and debt that have ground our recovery to a halt.”

Ryan emphasizes foreign policy at Toledo airport stop

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan talked to a crowd about his ticket’s plans for foreign policy, the economy and energy independence in the chilly Grand Aire hangar at Toledo Express Airport on Oct. 8.

“This is not an ordinary election. We’re not just deciding who’s going to be the next president for four more years. We are deciding the meaning of America. We are deciding what kind of people we are going to be and what kind of country we are going to have for an entire generation,” said the U.S. representative from Wisconsin.

“When President Obama came in four years ago, he inherited a tough situation, no two ways about that. Problem is, he didn’t make things better,” Ryan said.

Like his running mate Gov. Mitt Romney did in Virginia today, Ryan called for a change in foreign policy, specifically citing the recent killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other Americans in Libya.

“If you go home after this and turn on your TV, you will likely see the failures of the Obama foreign policy unfolding before our eyes. If you look around the world, what we are witnessing is the unraveling of the Obama foreign policy,” Ryan said.

“Four Americans were murdered in a terror attack in Benghazi. The point is, in a Romney administration, when we know we are clearly attacked by terrorists, we won’t be afraid to say what it is,” Ryan said.

“This was not simply an isolated incident but indicative of a broader failure. Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. The Middle East is in turmoil. Nearly two dozen nations we witness on our television screen are burning our flags in protest and riots,” he continued. “If we project weakness abroad, our adversaries are that much more willing to test us, to question our resolve.”

Ryan also said Obama’s possible defense cuts would strain the National Guard and reserves even further.

Europe’s economy served a warning many times in Ryan’s speech.

“You see in Europe, they waited too long. They kicked the can down the road. They came up with excuses,” Ryan said. He added that youth employment in Europe is at 20 percent and 50 percent in Greece and Spain.

Ryan also said more than 50 percent of recent American college graduate aren’t working or can’t find jobs in their chosen fields.

Romney has the leadership skills for job creation, Ryan stressed.

“The president has no new ideas. He doesn’t know how to grow this economy. Mitt Romney knows how to grow the economy because Mitt Romney has the experience because he knows how to create jobs because he’s done it before,” said Ryan, later citing Romney’s experience as a businessman and overseeing the Salt Lake City Olympics.

The vice presidential nominee also focused on the importance of small businesses, tax rates and creating jobs through pursuing energy.

“You see when we lower tax rates across the board, by closing loopholes primarily for the well-to-do, all that we are saying is, it’s your money in the first place, you keep more of it,” Ryan said.

On the first day of a Romney/Ryan presidency, Ryan vowed to approve the Keystone Pipeline. This idea received a standing ovation from the crowd.

Ryan also said the ticket’s energy plan would make America energy independent by the end of the decade.

He added, “We will send less of our money to countries that don’t like us. That’s a good idea.”

Ryan also emphasized God and religious freedom and their ties to the United States in his speech.

“[America’s] the only country founded on an idea,” he said. “That idea is so precious, Thomas Jefferson wrote it in the Declaration of Independence … our rights come from nature and nature’s God, not from government.”

Crowd response

Ike Parker, a minister from Delta, said that part of the rally spoke to him.

“I don’t like the things that Obama approves of like abortion, gay marriage, pills for 14-year-old kids, girls who are in school,” he said.

Parker said he had been a lifelong Democrat before Obama.

“I just hope that people will wake up and come to their senses [to] the way this country is going and the way Obama has driven it down the road,” he said.

Eventgoer Rita Gilbert of West Toledo said this is the first rally she has ever attended.

“Actually this is hope and change we can really believe in,” she said.

Rita’s husband, Ron, who used to work for Marathon Oil, said he was interested in Romney’s and Ryan’s thoughts on energy and thinks the country should look into coal energy.

“We have enough coal in the State of Ohio, West Virginia and Indiana to produce energy for the whole United States for the next 200 years,” Ron said. “[The government’s] looking in the wrong direction, they really are. We could be totally energy independent.”

Head of the Lucas County Republican Party Jon Stainbrook, U.S. Rep. Bob Latta and State Reps. Barbara Sears and Randy Gardner spoke before the vice presidential nominee. Each drove home the need for Romney supporters to be vocal and go door to door.

Latta also praised Ryan’s financial know-how.

“There’s not one person in Washington or I don’t think in this country that understands the federal budget and what’s happening to this country better than the next vice president,” Latta said.

Democratic response

During the Ryan rally, the Obama for America campaign had its own event. Lucas County Treasurer Wade Kapszukiewicz was at the airport Oct. 8 with a small group of Obama supporters and focused mostly on Obama’s auto industry rescue.

“We’re glad Paul Ryan came to Northwest Ohio, but we’re disappointed he does not support the auto rescue plan which saved our local economy and we’re disappointed he has embraced the policies of Mitt Romney, which, if they were implemented, would have sent certainly this region if not the country into a depression,” Kapszukiewicz said.

He added, “We are better off today than we were four years ago. Four years ago when the president took office, unemployment was well above 8 percent. Today it’s 7.8 percent, the lowest it’s been in over four years. In Lucas County, unemployment has gone from 8.5 percent to 7.6 percent. When Obama became president this economy was losing 800,000 jobs per month, every month. Now we’re gaining 150,000 jobs per month, every month.”

Biden in Toledo: “America is coming back”

The United Auto Workers’ Local 12 Union hall on Ashland Avenue rang with rowdy hoots and hollers from hundreds of people gathering to see Vice President Joe Biden the morning of March 15.

Young children bearing broad grins perched on their parents’ shoulders, squirming and craning their necks to catch a glimpse of the stage. Middle-aged and elderly people alike waved signs and chanted “Obama’s for the people; we are the people!” in anticipation of Biden’s arrival. Packed between rails separating them from the stage, their energy sounded electrically charged.

Photos by Joseph Herr.

Many of them were autoworkers themselves, present to hear Biden celebrate the industry’s revival.

Deborah McGaughey, a 57-year-old employee for the Chrysler Jeep plant, has worked in the industry for 29 years. She said she is personally thankful for Obama’s actions.

“He walked into a mess,” she said. “But he saved my job.”

Biden stressed this point to the crowds, sharing a story from his own childhood about his father making the long walk to his bedroom to tell him that he was going to move 156 miles away to look for a job.

Trapped in a city where jobs had dried up, Biden said, his father explained that once he found a job he’d move Biden and his mother there.

“A lot of you have made that long walk to your kids’ bedrooms,” Biden said. “Because of the actions of the president, things have changed today. Hundreds of thousands of workers are replacing the longest walks with a journey — it’s a journey that ends with workers who are able to go home and say, ‘I’ve got a job.’”

Biden criticized Republican opponents Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich for discrediting the success of the auto rescue. He called out Romney for his past prediction that Obama’s plan would make “GM the living dead” and for his 2008 statement that the country should “let Detroit go bankrupt.”

The crowd bellowed “Boo.”

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Biden highlighted the fact that Jeep and Chrysler have started hiring thousands of employees and that plants are expanding. He said that the Republicans can’t deny that good jobs are being created so they’re trying various flawed arguments. Republicans have said that the private sector would have stepped in to save the industry, that the plan was just a “giveaway to union bosses” and that Ford Motor Co. would have filled the void if GM and Chrysler failed, he said.

But even Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally has said that had the companies failed, they would have pulled down the whole industry, Biden reminded his listeners.

The Obama administration faced a great deal of criticism before the auto rescue plan was implemented and still does today. Critics say it is unfair for some businesses to go through the bankruptcy process when the government extends aid to others.

Biden said now, though, the rise of the two companies are showing the opponents are “dead wrong” and what Obama did was right.

“This is a man with steel in his spine; he knew that resurrecting the industry wasn’t going to be popular and he knew he was taking a chance. But he believed,” Biden said. “He wasn’t going to give up on a million jobs in the iconic industry that America invented.”

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After the speech, Rich DeVore, President of UAW Local 1435, stood outside on the lawn with some of his fellow auto workers. The union supports Biden because Obama supported them “when they were in a pinch,” DeVore said.

DeVore works at Chrysler in Perrysburg and said he sees evidence of the industry perking up first hand. He’s seen 35 new workers get hired within the past two weeks. About 13 others who left town for work elsewhere have been recalled recently, he said.

McGaughey, too, experiences the effect of government policy first hand. She said she liked how Biden called out the Republicans for their actions.

“They don’t care about the middle class,” she said. “Mitt Romney already said he doesn’t care about the poor.”

VP Biden to visit Chrysler’s supplier park Monday

The White House confirmed that the vice president will visit the Chrysler Supplier Park complex in Toledo on Aug. 23, reported FOX Toledo News, media partner of Toledo Free Press.

Biden is expected to discuss how suppliers have played a pivotal role in Chrysler’s recovery, according to a Chrysler Group spokesperson who confirmed the vice president’s visit. A Chrysler official at the Toledo Supplier Park said Biden will take a short tour of the facility and make some comments but no additional details are available.

Biden

The automaker returned to profitability in the second quarter of 2010, which ended June 30.

The Chrysler Group reported an operating profit of $183 million in the second quarter and positive cash flow of $474 million strengthening its cash position to $7.8 billion. Net revenues increased 8.2 percent to $10.5 billion in the second quarter from $9.7 billion in the first quarter, according to the company.

The Toledo Supplier Park was the first North American auto plant to have three major vehicle-building operations managed by suppliers, according to Chrysler. The plant, which employs about 2,000 workers, is located on the same site in North Toledo as Chrysler’s North Assembly Plant where the Jeep Liberty and Dodge Nitro are built.

The supplier complex opened in 2005 as a joint partnership of Chrysler, KUKA Systems Corp. North America, Magna International Inc. and Hyundai-owned Ohio Module Manufacturing Co. (OMMC). The plant includes the body shop operated by KUKA, paint shop by Magna and chassis assembly by OMMC with Chrysler handling assembly of the major components for the Jeep Wrangler.

Biden’s trip is a follow-up to President Barack Obama’s visit to Chrysler and General Motors assembly plants in Detroit last month.

FOX Toledo News reported that Biden will also visit Willard & Kelsey Solar Group in Perrysburg where he appeared on his last visit to the area June 23, 2009. The company was founded in 2007 to produce solar panels using silicon thin-film photovoltaic technology.

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